Nebula One turns servers into simple, private clouds with OpenStack (video)
Trying to create a large-scale, private cloud array can be a headache, since it often involves bringing disparate networking, server and storage systems together in one not-so-happy union. Wouldn't it be nice to have a box that could do most of the hard work? Nebula thinks its newly launched Nebula One controller will do the trick. The rackmount device's Cosmos OS quickly turns ordinary servers from the likes of Dell or HP into a unified cloud computer that centers on the more universal OpenStack platform, and which can also talk to Amazon Web Services. IT admins have a single interface to oversee the whole lot while skipping any outside help, and can scale up to a hefty 1,600 processor cores, 9.4TB of memory and 2.3PB of storage. You'll have to ask Nebula directly about pricing, although we suspect it's counting on the classic battle between time and money to clinch a deal -- the weeks saved in setup and maintenance could represent the real discount.
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Nebula introduces the cloud computer
Mountain View, Calif., April 2, 2013 –Nebula®, the cloud systems company, today announced the general availability of Nebula One™, the world's first enterprise cloud computer.
Nebula One was built from the ground up to power the next generation of big data, web, and mobile applications – while addressing enterprise security and management requirements and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Nebula One is a turnkey private cloud system that provides compute, network and storage services through a simple self-service interface and popular APIs, using industry-standard servers from vendors such as HP, IBM, and Dell.
"The Nebula One delivers on Nebula's mission to democratize cloud computing by bringing the simplicity, agility, and operational efficiency of the world's largest Internet companies to all enterprises at a fraction of the cost of public cloud services," said Chris C. Kemp, co-founder and CEO of Nebula.
Previous cloud solutions often required users to put in hours of work to provision and maintain their computing environment. The Nebula One private cloud system frees the organization to focus on applications instead of infrastructure.
Market-leading enterprises have been testing early versions of Nebula's product for the past year. In many industries, advances in infrastructure are driving the need for a new generation of computing technology that is an order of magnitude more efficient than what's available today. With the Nebula One,the ability to deploy pre-certified servers from vendors that customers already trust replaces the need for expensive, specialized computing infrastructure.
PARC has selected Nebula to power their private cloud infrastructure. "PARC researchers can now use and reuse the readily-available compute resources they need from the Nebula One cloud, provisioning in minutes what once took days to manually provision or months to procure," said Walt Johnson, Vice President, Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC.
The Product
At the core of the Nebula One cloud system is the Nebula Cloud Controller™, a hardware appliance that turns racks of certified industry-standard servers into a scalable on-premise infrastructure-as-a-service cloud system. Nebula One runs Cosmos, Nebula's distributed enterprise cloud operating system, which builds on OpenStack to provide a rich self-service user experience and compatibility with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack APIs.
While a single-rack deployment is enough for many medium-sized businesses, the Nebula One system can scale to multi-rack deployments to meet the needs of large enterprises.
The Nebula One is available for purchase today. For more information, and to learn more about purchasing a Nebula One system, visit www.nebula.com.
